Haven’t had time to post here recently since I’m currently editing the next Career Changers TV episode for May. But I wanted to take a moment to recommend you watch a couple of other shows for completely different reasons.

On Thurs., April 24 at 8 PM, PBS is airing There Once Was an Island, a documentary by Briar March. It’s about the impact of climate change and rising sea levels on the people who inhabit a tiny atoll off the coast of Papua New Guinea. As you watch the villagers debate what to do – leave or rebuild, even as the next storm threatens to destroy their homes again – there’s a sense of déjà vu because we’ve heard these same arguments in Hawaii and elsewhere. Some say these are simply acts of God, or nature at work; others contend global warming is the culprit.

I got to meet the filmmaker through my show’s videographer, Stanford Chang, and his wife, Shirley Thompson, who has edited a number of PBS projects. Briar is a petite, charming, fair-skinned woman from New Zealand, who lived on that remote island for several months while filming the story. Yet she seemed to have no trouble adjusting to village life or fitting in despite the cultural differences. In part, I think it was because they shared a common desire to find some answers to the villagers’ dilemma.

On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum is the new HBO show, Silicon Valley by Mike Judge. A lot of people know him for his animated series, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill. I wasn’t a big fan of either, but thought his movie Idiocracy was painfully funny in portraying the demise of Western civilization as being the result of stupid people out-breeding more intelligent couples who choose to have only one or two children. At times, the movie's satire is so spot on, it almost seems like a documentary.

He also wrote and directed Office Space, which is kind of a 1999 foreshadowing of the coming high tech revolution in which workers reject their corporate overlords to start their own anti-corporate companies with funny names like Yahoo, Google, Twitter -- and "Hooli" in the new HBO series. Since I’ve been doing my own Career Changers segments on local startups, accelerators, incubators and entrepreneurs, I had to laugh out loud when I saw amped-up versions of those types in Mike Judge’s semi-fictional Silicon Valley world.

WARNING: there’s a fair amount of profanity, bad sex gags (the geeks and high tech superstars still reek of testosterone even if they’re nerds) and the coding jokes will probably go over most peoples’ heads… but it is also right on the mark when it comes to dissecting a society that cares more about how fast we can download music files, than how fast our islands and shorelines are disappearing because of climate change.

If we didn’t laugh, we’d have to cry.

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Speaking of startups and entrepreneurs, the current episode of Career Changers TV features segments on the Honolulu Mini Makers Faire and local inventors. For daily viewing times and links to the CCTV YouTube Channel, please go to www.CareerChangers.TV.